river otter day

Unless I'm counting cards at the Black Jack table I'm generally not a fan of casinos. Occasionally though, they seem to do the right thing such as helping to sponsor River Otter Day. River Otter Day isn't really about otters but more about the Missouri River and riverfront development both of which could use some help. There have been some significant improvements in Kansas City's riverfront in the past 5 years. I suspect before the next decade passes we might even see a restaurant or two that overlooks the river. Not sure what the city has to do to develop a marina downtown but it could be as simple as rerouting the few barges that still use the Big Muddy to the Mississippi.

t-rex returns, recycling begins

T-Rex returned to Union Station just in time to find out that Prairie Village has finally started a curbside recycling program.

visual reviews of aural entertainment: rock paper scissors

Rock Paper Scissors.
4 April 2010. House Party, KCMO; attendance ~150

visual reviews of aural entertainment: taylor swift

Taylor Swift
@ the sprint center, KCMO. 3 April 2010; attendance, ~15,000.

if i had you

obamas secretly prepare for new world order

Think about it. An organic garden to feed the first family, some bees to produce honey, a hen house, and a rabbit hutch in the east garden—it can only mean one thing. Michelle Obama has been stockpiling the means to make her family self-sufficient. And given the mood of the right, she'd better hurry before they storm the castle.

Couple the First Lady's penchant for home cooking with Biggie O's penchant to always be surrounded by a cadre of weapon-toting, highly trained killers (who have ready access to a few thousand rounds of ammo) and you can see this family is set to maintain residency in the big white house indefinitely.

Revelation! During the coming apocalypse, the President will have the entire US military at his command.

If this liberal, healthy-eating-habit, forced agenda isn't stopped soon, America's ready access to Twinkies, incentive payments for high-fructose corn syrup production, and $1.99 whole roasted chickens could be threatened. The next thing you know, these Marxists will expect that all American children deserve a decent education and their parents a living-wage job. Beware! Univeral health care and tax increases will surely follow.

I'M FAT. FUCK OFF: The Kansas City Tattoo Convention

Except for the sentiment being splayed across the front of the I'M FAT: FUCK OFF t-shirt, the KC tattoo convention was surprisingly conventional. Like motorcycle bars, punk clubs, and art openings, the room suffered from a multiplicity of sameness packaged as rebellious attitude. Rage against the man morphed into a rancid Diesel ad populated by overweight white males fawned over by legions of slim, cute, American Apparel chicks cloaked in subservience and thrift store accessories. The strong man and the tamed woman with a back story of too many taxes, stifled personal freedoms, and a deep, patriotic abiding love of guns. It could just have been easily been a Tea Party gathering

Most of the tattoo work on display suffered from the notion that if you call it art, then it must be art. When viewed repeatedly, endless derivations of Sailor Jack inspired ink begins to resemble this century's version of a Normal Rockwell poster.

Granted the medium seems inherently limited but Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-American artist, has recently been stretching the bounds with noted effort. For a recent piece, Mr. Bilal had the names of ten Iraqi cities tatooed in Arabic on his back. The 5,000 black dots used to inscribe these names represent the visible American casulities from the now, 7-year long conflict. To represent the more than 100,000 largely invisible Iraqis who have perished in this war, Billal had the outline of Iraqi tatooed, using 100,000 dots of ultraviolet, black-light ink.

The work benefits a not-for-profit designed to bring children displaced by the Iraqi war to the US for education.